New hookah bar rules ignite ethnic debate in Troy

May 23, 2013

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Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

Candi Lee, 20, of Troy blows circles while hanging out with friends at Mist Hookah Lounge in Troy, Mich. on Thursday, May 16, 2013. The Troy City Council amended an ordinance on Monday that forces all hookah lounges in the city to close at midnight. For hookah bars like Mist, the move forces them to turn away customers who normally arrive at their lounges late at night. / Jarrad Henderson/Detroit Free Press

Mist co-owners, Brian Karju, 25, and Sarmad Yousif, 25, both of Sterling Heights stand outside their business on Thursday, May 16, 2013, at Mist Hookah Lounge in Troy. The Troy City Council amended a Troy ordinance on Monday that forces all hookah lounges in the city to close at midnight. For hookah bars like Mist, the move will force them to turn away customers who normally arrive at their lounges late at night. / Jarrad Henderson/Detroit Free Press

Angela Dery, 20, of Warren, Alyssa Dery, 18, of Warren, and Breanna Johnson, 18, of Clinton Township share a laugh last week at Mist Hookah Lounge in Troy. New city rules require that hookah bars close at midnight. / Jarrad Henderson/Detroit Free Press

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Seated around a large room at a strip mall in Troy, a dozen patrons at Mist lounge cheer as the Red Wings score on giant TVs while other customers shoot pool or just shoot the breeze.

At first, the place looks like any sports bar. But missing is the usual moneymaker — alcohol.

Instead of quaffing booze, customers sit in groups to puff on tobacco through tubes branched from tall vases filled with water — the hookah.

“Older people go to bars; this is a place for younger people,” said Alyssa Dery, 18, of Warren, as she sat with friends last week on a couch at Mist.

It’s one of three hookah bars in Troy and hundreds across the state, according to Arab-American health officials and the Michigan Department of Community Health. Along with cigar bars and Detroit’s three casinos, hookah bars are the rare places where it’s legal in Michigan to smoke in public, indoors.

But in Troy, the City Council has clamped down, dictating this month that hookah bars close at midnight — some had been open until 4 a.m. — and freezing the number of licenses at five. The City Council voted 7-0 to impose the new rules immediately. That prompted an outcry from owners and family members of owners, as well as the threat of a lawsuit from their attorney.

Outside Troy, hookah bars have a mixed record, some operating with virtually no complaints. But their ties to ethnic heritage bring cries of discrimination whenever officials curtail them.

“This is part of our tradition,” going back hundreds of years, said Hassan Saad, 41, of Dearborn Heights, a Lebanese-American and owner of Al Saha in Dearborn. That tradition is spreading rapidly in Michigan, particularly in metro Detroit and near college campuses statewide.

“I would say Michigan has 10 times more of these lounges in the last five years,” said Wali Altahif, tobacco prevention coordinator with the nonprofit Arab American and Chaldean Council, based in Lathrup Village. Although state records show that about 100 of the bars were licensed as of December, hundreds more could be operating beyond state and local oversight, Altahif said.

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“I do a lot of community outreach, and I’m seeing these open up all over, not only in cafes but also in banquet halls, some restaurants,” Altahif said. Michigan’s smoke-free law, in effect since 2010, prohibits any commingling of hookahs with establishments serving food or alcohol.

Numerous police calls

At Monday’s Troy City Council meeting, Nancy Morrison, who heads the Troy Community Coalition — a youth-oriented drug-abuse prevention group — gave each official a brochure warning that: “A smoker can inhale 100 times more smoke in one hookah session than in a single cigarette.”

Morrison has held regional meetings this year with substance-abuse prevention leaders from other communities, and with hospital-based health educators as well as health advisers from metro Detroit’s Arab social-services groups, “talking about the hookah and the problems it’s causing in our communities,” she said.

Troy police said hookah lounges are a community nuisance, citing a gunshot fired in a parking lot in February outside a lounge where an irate customer got into a scuffle, and another incident involving a fight with a baseball bat.

“It’s huge compared to what happens at our regular bars,” Mayer told city officials. Each of the city’s three hookah bars accounted for an average of 12 times as many police calls as the city’s alcohol-by-the-glass bars over the last year, Troy police Capt. Robert Redmond said.

Hookah bar owners, however, say their businesses are less hazardous than bars serving alcohol.

“I don’t see why we can’t stay open at least until the (alcohol-serving) bars close” at 2 a.m., said Mist owner Samad Yousif. Patrons of hookah bars don’t get pulled over for drunken driving, Yousif said.

“I know we’ve had some trouble,” Yousif said, referring to complaints about Mist. “A few people smoked marijuana in our parking lot. But we’re new at this and we’re learning. Why can’t they give us a chance,” said Yousif.

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Troy’s new rules could put the family-owned lounges out of business because customers who seek after-hours smoking will head to competitors in other cities, said Basher Dimitry, 23, of Southfield, a partner at Troy’s Tarboosh hookah lounge.

“We’re struggling as businesses,” said Dimitry, an investor with his father and uncle.

To complaints by residents at Troy council meetings, who alleged that hookah smoking could transmit the HIV virus, Dimitry said that each smoker has a personal, disposable mouthpiece.

“And I’m sorry we have neon lights, but we have no strippers,” he said of another complaint.

Mixed record elsewhere

The Arabic word “hookah” means vase. Although users claim that the smoke from a hookah is less noxious than other forms of smoking — some even say the water scrubs all nicotine from it — researchers with the World Health Organization and other agencies say just the opposite: that hookah smoking is deceptively dangerous because the smoke, cooled and humidified by a water bath, seems less irritating to users. The result is that smokers may sit for hours, puffing away, although users often say they don’t inhale.

“You take it in your mouth and blow it out,” said Moe Masry, 20, who was smoking at Mist last week with his brother Rakan, 23, after choosing a tobacco from among flavors named Bubble Gum, Fuzzy Navel and Winter Fresh. The brothers said they don’t drink alcohol. They paid $15 for a hookah, whose smoke lasts about 90 minutes, they said.

Kevin Brown, another Mist customer, said Troy’s regulations are unfair, the result of a cultural gap between the immigrant tradition of hookah smoking and a community accustomed to those selling the more dangerous drug of alcohol.

“It’s a purely upper-class, Caucasian city — that’s why” Troy reined in the hookah lounges, said Brown, 20, of Detroit.

Elsewhere in metro Detroit, hookah bars have a mixed record. In Farmington Hills, the city’s lone hookah bar has caused no problems since opening a year ago, Mayor Barry Brickner said. And in Dearborn, where state records show 13 lounges were open as of Dec. 31, city attorney Debra Walling said there hasn’t been much controversy with the bars.

But in Sterling Heights, after the city allowed two hookah bars to open several years ago, officials received enough complaints to justify blocking any new applications, city spokesman Steve Guitar said.

“We do not allow them, based on our zoning ordinance,” Guitar said. And Mt. Clemens Mayor Barb Dempsey said she was relieved that the city shut down its only hookah lounge after a police raid two years ago.

“We had tons of problems with it. They were selling liquor after hours, and we had a lot of underage kids puking on the sidewalk — just a lot of issues,” Dempsey said. “We do have one business that sells the hookah paraphernalia, but it’s not open like a bar.”